According to some polls, as many as 15 percent of American voters sided with Barack Obama in the 2012 election because of his swift relief actions for those devastated by Hurricane Sandy. History professor Edward Kohn posits here that it was another deadly natural disaster—the August 1896 heat wave in New York City—that, perhaps less directly, assured Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. While some 1500 people died during ten oppressively hot days, police commissioner Roosevelt spearheaded efforts to get ice to overcrowded and unventilated tenements and hose down the city's streets—a face-to-face experience with the working poor that helped TR earn the governorship of New York and later the vice presidency under William McKinley.